Alexandr Hrustevich playing Vivaldi.. ? pic.twitter.com/bBcJruMVVu
— Buitengebieden (@buitengebieden) December 4, 2022
Also see Alexander Hrustevich’s bio.
On 12/06/2022,
in creativity, music,
by Daniel Christian
On 12/03/2022,
in active learning, assistive technologies, Augmented Reality (AR), cloud-based computing / apps / other cloud-related, collaboration, creativity, digital audio, digital learning, digital video, e-books, e-publishing related items (EPUB and more), education technology, Google, instructional design, internet, IT in HE, multimedia, online learning, online media, productivity / tips and tricks, remote teaching and learning, tools, UK, universities, vision/possibilities, wearables, XR - extended reality,
by Daniel Christian
How to Do Screen Recording with Just Your Browser — from Hongkiat.com
Excerpt:
Do you know you can perform screen recording without using any native tool provided by your operating system or any 3rd party screen recording app?
Here’s an awesome screen recording tool by Google that you need to know about if you haven’t already. And all you need is your Google Chrome browser.
To start, go to the Google Admin Toolbox website and click on Screen Recorder.
Speaking of applications and tools, also see:
Welcome To Day One Of #Appvent22 — from ictevangelist.com by Mark Anderson
What is Book Creator? Tips & Tricks — from techlearning.com by Erik Ofgang
Book Creator is a free tool that allows users to create multimedia ebooks
Excerpt:
Book Creator is a free education tool designed to enable students to engage with class material in a direct and active way by creating multimedia ebooks with a variety of functions.
Available as a web app on Chromebooks, laptops, and tablets, and also as a standalone iPad app, Book Creator is a digital resource that helps students explore their creative sides while learning.
The tool lends itself well to active learning and collaborative projects of all kinds, and is appropriate for various subjects and age groups.
On 12/01/2022,
in art, creativity, digital photography, maker movement, photography,
by Daniel Christian
Animals of Translucent Botanics Center in Molly Devlin’s Ethereal Portraits — from thisiscolossal.com by Grace Ebert and Molly Devlin
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Top of the Stack: Colossal’s Favorite Art Books of 2022 — from thisiscolossal.com
Excerpt:
As we near the end of 2022, we’re taking a look back at the year, starting with the books we found most compelling, impressive, and inspirational. We’ve published dozens of articles on artist monographs and compendiums of broader topics across art and design and science and history over the last 12 months, and these are the 10 titles that impacted us most.
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Vital Impacts Launches a Winter Print Sale with Photos from Jane Goodall, David Doubilet, and Beth Moon to Raise Money for Conservation — from thisiscolossal.com by Grace Ebert and Vital Impacts
On 11/29/2022,
in A/V -- audio/visual, creativity, digital audio, digital photography, digital video, drama/theater, experimentation, ideas, innovation, learning spaces, maker movement, media/film, multimedia, music, productivity / tips and tricks, skills, technologies for your home, television, tools, user experience (UX), vendors, vision/possibilities, visualizing information, vocational / trades,
by Daniel Christian
Making a Digital Window Wall from TVs — from theawesomer.com
Drew Builds Stuff has an office in the basement of his parents’ house. Because of its subterranean location, it doesn’t get much light. To brighten things up, he built a window wall out of three 75? 4K TVs, resulting in a 12-foot diagonal image. Since he can load up any video footage, he can pretend to be anywhere on Earth.
From DSC:
Perhaps some ideas here for learning spaces!
Artist Spotlight: Shuyang Zhou — from booooooom.com
On 11/29/2022,
in algorithms, art, Artificial Intelligence / Machine Learning / Deep Learning, Asia, assistive technologies, career development, change, cloud-based computing / apps / other cloud-related, communications, computer science, content development, corporate / business world, corporate universities / corporate training, creativity, curriculum, disruption, education technology, educational games / serious games, emerging technologies, entrepreneurship, experimentation, future, game-changing environment, ideas, innovation, instructional design, intelligent systems, intelligent tutoring, languages and translation, Legal operations, legal technologies, tools, training / L&D, vendors, workplace,
by Daniel Christian
A bot that watched 70,000 hours of Minecraft could unlock AI’s next big thing — from technologyreview.com by Will Douglas Heaven
Online videos are a vast and untapped source of training data—and OpenAI says it has a new way to use it.
Excerpt:
OpenAI has built the best Minecraft-playing bot yet by making it watch 70,000 hours of video of people playing the popular computer game. It showcases a powerful new technique that could be used to train machines to carry out a wide range of tasks by binging on sites like YouTube, a vast and untapped source of training data.
The Minecraft AI learned to perform complicated sequences of keyboard and mouse clicks to complete tasks in the game, such as chopping down trees and crafting tools. It’s the first bot that can craft so-called diamond tools, a task that typically takes good human players 20 minutes of high-speed clicking—or around 24,000 actions.
The result is a breakthrough for a technique known as imitation learning, in which neural networks are trained to perform tasks by watching humans do them.
…
The team’s approach, called Video Pre-Training (VPT), gets around the bottleneck in imitation learning by training another neural network to label videos automatically.
Speak lands investment from OpenAI to expand its language learning platform — from techcrunch.com by Kyle Wiggers
Excerpts:
“Most language learning software can help with the beginning part of learning basic vocabulary and grammar, but gaining any degree of fluency requires speaking out loud in an interactive environment,” Zwick told TechCrunch in an email interview. “To date, the only way people can get that sort of practice is through human tutors, which can also be expensive, difficult and intimidating.”
Speak’s solution is a collection of interactive speaking experiences that allow learners to practice conversing in English. Through the platform, users can hold open-ended conversations with an “AI tutor” on a range of topics while receiving feedback on their pronunciation, grammar and vocabulary.
It’s one of the top education apps in Korea on the iOS App Store, with over 15 million lessons started annually, 100,000 active subscribers and “double-digit million” annual recurring revenue.
If you last checked in on AI image makers a month ago & thought “that is a fun toy, but is far from useful…” Well, in just the last week or so two of the major AI systems updated.
You can now generate a solid image in one try. For example, “otter on a plane using wifi” 1st try: pic.twitter.com/DhiYeVMEEV
— Ethan Mollick (@emollick) November 26, 2022
Is AI Generated Art Really Coming for Your Job? — from edugeekjournal.com by Matt Crosslin
Excerpt:
So, is this a cool development that will become a fun tool for many of us to play around with in the future? Sure. Will people use this in their work? Possibly. Will it disrupt artists across the board? Unlikely. There might be a few places where really generic artwork is the norm and the people that were paid very little to crank them out will be paid very little to input prompts. Look, PhotoShop and asset libraries made creating company logos very, very easy a long time ago. But people still don’t want to take the 30 minutes it takes to put one together, because thinking through all the options is not their thing. You still have to think through those options to enter an AI prompt. And people just want to leave that part to the artists. The same thing was true about the printing press. Hundreds of years of innovation has taught us that the hard part of the creation of art is the human coming up with the ideas, not the tools that create the art.
A quick comment from DSC:
Possibly, at least in some cases. But I’ve seen enough home-grown, poorly-designed graphics and logos to make me wonder if that will be the case.
How to Teach With Deep Fake Technology — from techlearning.com by Erik Ofgang
Despite the scary headlines, deep fake technology can be a powerful teaching tool
Excerpt:
The very concept of teaching with deep fake technology may be unsettling to some. After all, deep fake technology, which utilizes AI and machine learning and can alter videos and animate photographs in a manner that appears realistic, has frequently been covered in a negative light. The technology can be used to violate privacy and create fake videos of real people.
However, while these potential abuses of the technology are real and concerning that doesn’t mean we should turn a blind eye to the technology’s potential when using it responsibly, says Jaime Donally, a well-known immersive learning expert.
From DSC:
I’m still not sure about this one…but I’ll try to be open to the possibilities here.
Educators Are Taking Action in AI Education to Make Future-Ready Communities — from edsurge.com by Annie Ning
Excerpt:
AI Explorations and Their Practical Use in School Environments is an ISTE initiative funded by General Motors. The program provides professional learning opportunities for educators, with the goal of preparing all students for careers with AI.
Recently, we spoke with three more participants of the AI Explorations program to learn about its ongoing impact in K-12 classrooms. Here, they share how the program is helping their districts implement AI curriculum with an eye toward equity in the classroom.
Stealth Legal AI Startup Harvey Raises $5M in Round Led By OpenAI — from lawnext.com by Bob Ambrogi
Excerpt (emphasis DSC):
A hitherto stealth legal AI startup emerged from the shadows today with news via TechCrunch that it has raised $5 million in funding led by the startup fund of OpenAI, the company that developed advanced neural network AI systems such as GPT-3 and DALL-E 2.
The startup, called Harvey, will build on the GPT-3 technology to enable lawyers to create legal documents or perform legal research by providing simple instructions using natural language.
The company was founded by Winston Weinberg, formerly an associate at law firm O’Melveny & Myers, and Gabriel Pereyra, formerly a research scientist at DeepMind and most recently a machine learning engineer at Meta AI.
On 11/25/2022,
in 21st century, 24x7x365 access, algorithms, art, Artificial Intelligence / Machine Learning / Deep Learning, computer science, content aggregration, content development, content repositories, creativity, future, human-computer interaction (HCI), ideas, innovation, law schools, legislatures / government / legal, platforms, programming, tools, trends, United States,
by Daniel Christian
This Copyright Lawsuit Could Shape the Future of Generative AI — from wired.com by Will Knight
Algorithms that create art, text, and code are spreading fast—but legal challenges could throw a wrench in the works.
Excerpts:
A class-action lawsuit filed in a federal court in California this month takes aim at GitHub Copilot, a powerful tool that automatically writes working code when a programmer starts typing. The coder behind the suit argues that GitHub is infringing copyright because it does not provide attribution when Copilot reproduces open-source code covered by a license requiring it.
…
Programmers have, of course, always studied, learned from, and copied each other’s code. But not everyone is sure it is fair for AI to do the same, especially if AI can then churn out tons of valuable code itself, without respecting the source material’s license requirements. “As a technologist, I’m a huge fan of AI ,” Butterick says. “I’m looking forward to all the possibilities of these tools. But they have to be fair to everybody.”
Whatever the outcome of the Copilot case, Villa says it could shape the destiny of other areas of generative AI. If the outcome of the Copilot case hinges on how similar AI-generated code is to its training material, there could be implications for systems that reproduce images or music that matches the style of material in their training data.
Also legal-related, see:
- Columbia, Georgetown and Stanford Law Schools Quit ‘U.S. News’ — from insidehighered.com by Scott Jaschik
Also related to AI and art/creativity from Wired.com, see:
- Picture Limitless Creativity at Your Fingertips — by Kevin Kelly
Artificial intelligence can now make better art than most humans. Soon, these engines of wow will transform how we design just about everything. - This Uncensored AI Art Tool Can Generate Fantasies—and Nightmares — by Will Knight
Open source project Stable Diffusion allows anyone to conjure images with algorithms, but some fear it will be used to create unethical horrors. - Who Will Own the Art of the Future? — by Jessica Rizzo
OpenAI has announced that it’s granting Dall-E users the right to commercialize their art. For now.
On 11/24/2022,
in creativity, faith, global / globalization, hearts -- matters of the heart, relationships, religion,
by Daniel Christian
4 Enter his gates with thanksgiving
and his courts with praise;
give thanks to him and praise his name.
5 For the Lord is good and his love endures forever;
his faithfulness continues through all generations.
From DSC:
Thank you for you LORD!!! And thank you for your patience with me, and for your mercy, forgiveness, and love (which it has taken me a long time to realize/embrace). Thank you for being active (most likely, mind-blowingly so).
Thank you for your creativity. Thank you for my/our senses of sight, hearing, taste, smell, and touch — and for all that our bodies can do. We truly are fearfully and wonderfully made. Thank you for our minds and our hearts — may they be inclined towards doing right by you and by others.
On 11/11/2022,
in art, creativity,
by Daniel Christian
Artist Spotlight: Shingo Yamazaki — from booooooom.com
Artist Spotlight: Alberto Ortega — from booooooom.com
On 11/09/2022,
in change, content development, corporate / business world, corporate universities / corporate training, creativity, digital audio, digital learning, digital video, drama/theater, educational games / serious games, ideas, instructional design, learning ecosystem, Learning Experience Design, microlearning, motivation, story, storytelling, training / L&D, workplace, writing,
by Daniel Christian
Beyond Courses: Instructional Approaches in 2022 — from learningguild.com by Jane Bozarth
Excerpts (emphasis DSC):
In researching “upskilling for L&D practitioners” earlier this year, Learning Guild members were asked what they feel has been the biggest shift in their work over time: While technology has driven much change, sometimes seemingly exponentially, nearly everyone talked about a different sort of shift. This was true even of those who landed on the younger end of the experience spectrum. According to respondents, the biggest change is the move away from the idea that the primary role of L&D is to create “courses.” Technology changed and became easier to use, enabling development of myriad digital solutions. As noted in that report, respondents viewed this change as welcome and positive.
…
When asked what other types of content respondents created to be delivered OUTSIDE of a traditional course, the most common responses were creating video and job aids/performance support materials. Microlearning and curated content were also frequently mentioned, and curated collections of existing material was popular with those engaged in traditional design.
Also relevant/see:
Games, Organizing, & Motivation: ID Links 10/25/22 — from christytuckerlearning.com by Christy Tucker
Curated links on games built in Twine, storytelling, organization, useful tools, motivation, and transitioning from teaching to ID.
From DSC:
Under the Storytelling and CYOA books section, it was interesting to see the Random Plot Generator, where Christy wrote: “A writing prompt tool to generate two characters, a setting, situation, theme, and character action. This could be a fun way to start scenarios if you’re feeling stuck. h/t Jean Marrapodi.”
I thought this might be a good tool for developing writers, improv actors, and likely others as well! 🙂
Also from Christy Tucker, see:
- Voice Over and Video in Branching Scenarios
When should you use voice over and video in branching scenarios? Use them for stable content and when multimedia improve skill transfer.
If the content is very stable and unlikely to change much over time, voice over might make sense in a branching scenario. Investing in creating video also makes more sense for more stable content and skills than for something that changes every 6 months.
“Dissolution” by Artist Huntz Liu — from booooooom.com
